Category: Sustainability

AWS is pleased to officially announce the innovative startups chosen to participate in the AWS Sustainable Cities Accelerator. These selected startups are developing groundbreaking solutions to help cities address sustainability challenges, like tackling traffic analysis, smart internet of things (IoT) lampposts, and much more. AWS launched the Sustainable Cities Accelerator program in March to help address the crucial need for innovation and collaborative solutions to address global climate and clean tech challenges. The 12 finalists in the cohort originate from four countries across North America, Latin America, and Europe, and represent a wide-range of innovative sustainable solutions.

The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “Invest in our planet.” In celebration of this year’s theme, we want to highlight the important sustainability work featured in the AWS documentary series, Climate Next, which explores the ways organizations and communities in four distinct regions are investing in cloud-powered solutions to fight climate change.

Open data is helping researchers and nonprofit conservationists protect vulnerable species around the world. In celebration of Earth Day, we are shining a spotlight on two sustainability stories from the AWS Fix This podcast from AWS, a podcast exploring the ways people use technology to address some of the world’s most pressing challenges.

Today marks World Health Day, and this year’s theme is “Our planet, our health.” The World Health Organization (WHO) is using this day to drive global attention to the urgent actions needed to protect our planet and prioritize well-being in societies, and supporting these efforts is core to our principles and values at AWS. We’re proud to support our customers and partners who are solving some of society’s biggest problems with the cloud to make these ideas and changes a reality. Here are just a few examples of how our customers are leveraging AWS technology to innovate for our planet and our health.

On March 31, the AWS Summit Brussels returned to the Egg in Brussels, Belgium, where Max Peterson, vice president of AWS worldwide public sector, and Isabella Groeger-Cechowicz, vice president of AWS worldwide public sector of EMEA sales, took the stage for the event’s keynote. They discussed how AWS is supporting customers with a dedication to data privacy and protection, sustainability, and social impact. Three customer speakers joined them onstage to share stories about how they use the cloud to drive impact for their missions. Read on for what you might have missed at the AWS Summit Brussels.

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Rafael Monge Vargas, director of the National Center of GeoEnvironmental Information (CENIGA) at the Costa Rica’s Ministry of Environment and Energy (MINAE), to share how his team is helping advance conservation and economic development in Costa Rica and how they utilize ASDI and AWS to support these efforts.

As part of the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI), AWS invited Nils Helset, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of DigiFarm, to share how AWS Cloud technology and open data support DigiFarm’s efforts in precision farming to make agricultural practices more sustainable and efficient.

In 2021, AWS launched the Clean Energy Accelerator to help startups working in clean energy accelerate their impact. This accelerator resulted in funding and growth opportunities for the participating startups. Building off this success, AWS is now launching a new accelerator focused on the rapid growth of clean tech innovations: the AWS Sustainable Cities Accelerator. The new accelerator will focus on mobility and transportation with a goal helping companies learn how to innovate and accelerate their mission growth by leveraging advanced cloud-based technologies.

The nonprofit American Forests is focused on advancing social equity with a national reforestation movement. Trees provide significant benefits against heat related illnesses and climate change, and trees can help advance social equity when they are planted in the neighborhoods that need them the most. But the challenge of achieving Tree Equity across the country is immense. To address this, American Forests is leading a new national campaign through the Tree Equity Score, powered by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud.

In Africa, scientific data is critical to helping the nation’s leaders tackle issues like water scarcity and climate change. A collaboration between nonprofit Digital Earth Africa (DE Africa) and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative (ASDI) is helping them access the data they need. DE Africa operates a free and user-friendly Earth observation (EO) data service that provides African policymakers with insights into a range of challenges, from natural resource management to the impacts of climate change. The service has already helped Ghanaian officials identify and tackle illegal mining, and provided decision-ready insights on flooding and drought in Tanzania and Nigeria.